The Verbosity of the Lamb: The Cyborg Anatomy of Stories

Kristen Lamb is an intelligent and eloquent writer and blogster. You can see her blog here.

She does this thing that many writers do, which is to describe the methods and means of storytelling and writing via metaphor. A sensible mode of instruction, of course. Tried and true as a thing that's been tried a lot and determined to be pretty true.

Thing is about metaphor, though, is it's like describing things with smells: when done aptly, has the power to reach into people and make them remember their childhood like the smell of vomited summer squash (a traumatic memory of mine, at least).

Her metaphors work well usually. She describes plot as the story's bones and she describes the antagonist as the story's engine. I like both of these ideas, not the least because they imply that stories are a kind of diesel-punk skeleton monster, tortured to action by the very thing that gives it life, which sounds cool (and I'll be logging it away as a thing to write about someday). There's a metaphor she uses that I don't think works, and that's something she says about character.

Characters, she says, are like your story's heart.

I don't think so, and this is why:

In modern, western culture, the heart does two things: it provides (figuratively) provides emotion, and (literally) maintains life. I agree that characters have a part in giving stories life and emotion, but I don't think that those are a character's primary functions.

I think that a better metaphor to describe characters in stories would be fingers. This is why: if the diesel-punk skeleton from above has a heart, but no fingers, then it's an interesting idea, but it doesn't do anything. With fingers, the diesel-punk skeleton has the ability to move around and change things.

In a reductionist practice of analysis, stories need to move around. They need to misdirect, conjure, scratch, play music, make signals, conduct, strike out...they need to move. Characters provide movement--they're interactive--they do things.

I do not disagree that the diesel-punk skeleton/Antagonized Plot requires some sort of emotional center and maintainer of life like a heart; I also don't think that the fingers/characters would be divorced from the emotive and living functions of the heart. The characters, I will forever contest, express ever significant part of stories--the "heart" included. I just think that the heart of stories is kept somewhere other than in its characters.

I think that the heart of stories is kept in the reader and the writer, but I'm not sure how to describe that, so I'm going to think about it for a while before I try to explain.

Clark Kent! Master at Flip Cup (special guest Within Temptation)

Do you know that moment when you've always suspected you had a skill but you've never had any evidence of it? Like when Harry Potter dscovered he could wiggle his ears, or when Clark Kent turned out to be a mean Flip Cup competitor, or that story we all know about the spider playing clarinet.... Or that could be a dream I had. Anyway, that moment occurs sometimes, and we discover ourselves to be a more complete human being than we had previously, dismally supposed.

Two days ago it happened to me. The art and literary magazine I was on the staff for at school was having its release. I was head of promotions so I was in charge of the party. I volunteered to be MC. I knew when I volunteered that it would be a small sort of nightmare. That never worried me, however. No matter what happened, the book had been printed on time and on budget, so any further success was gravy.

That knowledge relaxed me. Which turned out to be fortunate since at first it seemed that every possible thing went wrong. We wanted some of our poetry and prose contributors to read for us, also they needed to be introduced by the three editors of the different genres we had represented in the magazine; additionally we had a quite intelligent but also deaf art director who had prepared a statement to be interpreted by some very talented ASL interpreters; before all of them went on, we had two dudes in charge of explaining that this was the first year the magazine would have an online version, so the secondary online journal lady needed to get up and introduce the primary online journal viking dude; and prior to all of that our faculty advisor needed to get up and give a two minute spiel on the value of why we were gathered here today. All that needed to happen, and no one had prepared anything, and not everyone had expected to go on, and our contributors just trickled in, and I'd never met any of them before though they did, fortunately, all end up appearing...and I hadn't written any jokes.

It was a complete nightmare, theoretically. As it turned out, though, I have a pretty good head under that kind of pressure. I got everyone lined up, gave them a brief idea what was going to happen and where they stood in the arrangement. Then I kicked back and let it all roll out. I introduced the event, the book, and all the people. Under the circumstances, it seemed to go beautifully.

Quite encouraging, really.

A Speech I'm about to Deliver

Three quotes:

Aristotle’s definition of man: “Man is a reasoning animal.”

Niccolo Machiavelli on the possession of power: “Some are born to power, some rise to it, while others have power thrust upon them.”

And the Dalai Lama on the voice of the universe: “The universe has no voice of its own. We are the voice of the universe.”

So if reasoning mankind is the voice of the universe, with our voice expressed in words, who is the voice of mankind? Nowhere is the devotion to expressing the breadth of humanity more masochistically obsessive than in the writer. This gives the writer a unique kind of power, not begotten, nor earned, nor bequeathed, but something different. The power most respected we reasoning animals is the intellectual heritage of our forebears, to which influence we bow more fiercely than to any living king. And it is said that history is written by the victor. This is not true. History is written by the guy with the pen, and he has the power to turn a fair and stately ruler into a conniving hunchback for all eternity.

A hefty power. And ironically an ill-respected one. The voice of the writer is always heard and his name oft forgot. In this soundbite world made of immediate colors and loud noises the writer is misunderstood. Writing is seen as esoteric and a luxury and in this heighth of literacy and age of easy publication everyone can write a book. And everyone does, desiring their voice in history they flood the market with half-conceived manuscripts. I have nothing bad to say about them. I believe everyone is entitled to not less than one pass at a book. But there are those who need to write as they need to breathe and now more than ever their voices are more difficult to hear above the crowd. Worse, the world, misunderstanding the need, tells the writer to stop--that they cannot succeed. A writer’s competition is more grisly than it has ever been. He must fight to be heard above those who would write because they feel like it and he must also fight against his own mind telling him that the world has predicted his failure.

Writing is necessarily, contrarily, and simultaneously a social and a lonesome endeavor. Its object is man so to be written of man must be observed, but to write of man a writer must find his voice in the silence. No one understands this contradiction better than other writers. The primary of humanity makes the writer feel himself alone, but the writer must have courage in order to succeed. Therefore, if you elect me to Office X of this fine body of individuals, I propose the invention of a statewide creative writing support program in which writers are given the opportunity to meet and talk and given tools to succeed. Writers cannot but write, and they will write about you. As it is, their climate of creation is bitter. We could improve it. Our great grandchildren will someday read what the writers of today have to say. So ask yourself: what review of the times would you have them leave behind? Are you destined to be a hunchback?

What Would You Write, with Opportunity to Do It?

What story would give you paroxysms of bliss to discover it coming from your imagination?

Yesterday I saw Christopher Moore give a talk to promote his new book, Sacre Bleu. He's a clever dude, and with Neil Gaiman I think one of the seventy people I aspire to be, or be very nearly similar to. Anyway, over the course of his talky talk, M. Moore had cause to explain some of his origin story, as it were. Most of M. Moore's origins--the explanations he gave for being how he was who he is--involved, essentially, dares. He wrote Practical Demon Keeping because Stephen King's literary agent said in the forward of some best-of-horror compilation that horror was great because it could be mixed with any theme...except whimsy. And M. Moore snickered at that and said "like hell!" and wrote Practical Demon Keeping, a whimsical horror novel. Since then he has written almost only whimsical horror, and been successful at it, if not successfully frightening all the time. But we take what is proffered. His air of accepting dares influenced all the stories of why he wrote, and I found that hilarious and I'm mulling it over. A different part of his attitude stuck with me, though; that being his joy in it.

M. Moore writes the stories he wants to read. That sounds reasonably intuitive. A writer is called to write that which he would be pleased reading. Many of my other influences share this sometimes childish glee in what they write. My buddy/mentore, Jenny, and our mutual demon-muse, Ali, take this sometimes creepy enjoyment in things like "jerkified corpses" and the general mayhem arising from unexpected monsters. The gore aside, they write stories that they want to read. They take pleasure in what they write. It's fun to see up close. And the pleasure they take in their stories is apparent in the reading of the stories themselves.

So my musing point: What do you like to read? As much as I do like stories and books, I'm having the devil's own time trying to figure out what I like reading. Like as not, I'm one of the few people like that. I'm trying to figure it out, however. I want to write what I like to read, but I'm not sure what I like to read. It's a peculiar predicament.

I'm going to stew on it, and no doubt produce some odd, ADD, obscure puzzle of a thing, pretty to its maker. In the meantime, just for discussing it, what story would you want to see produced? What weaving thing would you make with the time and energy, eh? Mine eyes are tearing with curiosity, dear heart.

Multi-Tasking, While Impossible, Still Sounds a Good Idea

Those two or three fans of my novel will be pleased to hear that it's going beautifully, after a fashion. I'm making progress upon it in leaps and zig-zagging bounds, which is possible it turns out. The writers reading this blog, however, will agree that working on the same project for too long all by itself can make imagination fester in stagnation, and I have been working on the same novel for a very long time. Lately I've been having the problem that I'm second guessing my novel. I'm ironing that out, righting wrongs and things. Anyone who's seen any of it knows there's a lot of imagination in the fantasy, and it will continue to need imagination. I'm too close to it and I'm missing things. The response many people have to this situation is a temporary abandonment of the project. That route is distasteful to me. To save it, however, I need to do something that aids in restoring my perspective. I think I've lighted on the solution.

Short stories. Lots of them. I'm going to remind myself of my novel daily, but I'm going to bring my study of creating short fiction to the forefront of my creative attention. That's it. Not too complicated. I seem to go on a kick like this every now and then, usually with more confidence than the last time. We'll see how this one goes.

Send me a message if you feel like your idea is the next big thing but you don't want to write it yourself. I might look at it.

In Spite of Opinions, Education Works Sometimes

I have just finished my spring break. In a fit of minor irony, I spent the whole break applying my education. This is the story:

On the twelfth of this month, so just exactly one week ago, my mentore Jenny found a contest with a particular theme. We thought it'd be cool if the UGWP all attempted to write a story which fit the theme. We have just enough time to maybe write a story before submitting to our next critique meeting at the end of this month, do the critique during April, and get our critiques back in time to rewrite before the May first deadline for the contest. We are the Underground Writing Project, after all, so doing projects is a good idea. It made me nervous, though, because my writing process almost always takes a gazillion years. I have to ponder and meander and experiment. There's a lot of not writing parts of my process. Having only thirteen days to bring a story from nothing but a random prompt to fully fleshed seemed undoable in that time.

I'm down for trying and going down in flames any day. The try needed to be a good one, so I did the following:

Step one (happening on the twelfth): My first inspirational process is musical. The contest theme is "In the Dark." I had no idea for characters or situations at first. To discover some I put my zune on shuffle and thought about the phrase "In the Dark" and things that therein might occur. After an hour or two of my utter mishmash of musical taste I had an answer to the question which every story ought to answer; that question being: who is it about, what does he want, what's in the way, and does he get it or not? I had an answer. It felt good.

Step two (still on the twelfth): I wrote a mad and completely banal three pages of prose that gave the loosest possible rundown of the story. It was hardly even useable as an outline, but it did suggest certain continuity strengths and weaknesses to press or amend.

Step three (still on the twelfth): Wrote a dramatic outline. I've talked about Shakespeare's Five Act structure before. I really believe in it as a useful tool for designing interesting, dramatic story structures. If you like bullet pointed outlines especially--I do--then it's a great way of visualizing how the story could really look while leaving yourself enormous flexibility. The outlines I write in this vein tend to look like a bunch of visuals and trigger points that might be essential to telling the story. Through experience I've discovered that this outlining process has some huge drawbacks. "Finished" stories written entirely and only according to this outline tend to be somewhat flat and obscure, somehow. Without a little coaxing they lack directness or conflict. It's strange but true.

Step four (still on the twelfth): Tried to start step four and discovered that writing the same story from start to finish twice in one day got annoying and I couldn't quite conjure the will to start. Took a break.

Step five (on the thirteenth): Wrote a Five Beats outline of the story. A couple months back, Jan C Jones, an editor of sorts, came to be a guest critic at a UGWP meeting. She explained that movies often have a structure of five major "beats," or important steps, that make an entertaining story. I found the advice really good. I'd been thinking about trying it as an outlining technique, so for this story I did. It took up one page of my notebook. So far all of these outlines had taken up almost eight pages, which together is not that much writing, but it was a huge amount of work. I'd written the story three times in two days already and I was gaining the familiarity that I think you need in order to tell a story well.

Step six (on the fourteenth): Now, I wanted to write it as a script. There are three kinds of scripts with which I have any familiarity: movie scripts, play scripts, and comic book scripts. I've recently had a positive experience using a comic book script as an outline for a story. I wanted to try it again. For this one I decided to try a script for a play. A friend of mine suggested that stage play scripts emphasize where people are on the stage. That would be important for the story I had conceptualized. Scripts are a good outlining tool, I feel, because you can get a whole story out, with scenes and setting and dialogue and all, without fussing with especially pretty prose. You're freed up to leave the prose aside and concentrate on it later. Well, I started the script. It never got very far because by page two of it I had a sudden inspiration of a good way to start the actual prose story. It felt right to leave the script aside and just strike into the story while the energy was there.

So now today is the nineteenth. I just finished writing the story--it needs some editing, but it's all outside my head now. Because of the intense outlining I did there the process was pretty fast. I had five whole days to dawdle. Now I can go over it and fix typoes. The ride was fun, though I lack objectivity about the result.

I think this was a good process. Y'all should try it.

Haiku about My Writing Philosophy

Write a Haiku about your attitude toward your elected obsession. Here's mine:

Shakespeare's goatee and
Joey Ramone's irony
here met. Explosion.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Writers of the Future Award winner Patrick Rothfuss' debut novel is a sailing example of how very detailed a character study can be. The Name of the Wind is the name of the novel. It's the story of the magician/warrior/hero/antihero Kvothe raising himself from a favored son of a traveling minstrel troupe in the beginning of the book to a shining example of mysterious innkeeper with a more mysterious past, also at the beginning of the book. It makes a sort of sense when you read it. The novel is constructed Frankenstein-wise in storytelling format, where the bulk of the tale is bookended by oldish Kvothe sharing his history. And goodness gracious but Mister Rothfuss is devoted to this character's history. Plot is suspended for some five hundred pages in the middle of the book to allow all the nuances of Master Kvothe's character to be thoroughly explored. Admittedly, Master Kvothe is an engaging character to follow, both witty and driven. He's an ideal tragic hero, quite built up with spectacular advantages above his peers, but his amazing amazingness never manages to annoy one because one finds oneself too bloody irritated by Kvothe's incredible failings which more than counterbalance his remarkable genius. The book is layers of Kvothe's victories carried up by the blunders he causes himself to need to repair. The cycle is amazing. Kvothe does something to set you in awe, and you are in awe for a page or two until he makes you smack your forehead with the book because he's gone on tripped something terrible. Then you're interested for the next fifty pages because you want to find out whether he fixes it again. Then he does...then he trips again, but worse. Bang on the litso, flash in the glazzies.

The cycle is exhausting. It is also fortuitous because the book lacks for enormous stretches one aspect which this critic would consider essential: plot. I mean...it's interesting, because I think that perhaps M. Rothfuss had been watching a lot of very good TV while writing The Name of the Wind. The book is constructed quite episodically. There are many small plot arches, driving the story forward in hops. But except for infrequent brushes with the initial conflict introduced inside the first hundred pages, M. Rothfuss he suspends for the next four hundred fifty pages. The book is seven hundred thirty pages long. Way more than half of the book has zero plot. Four hundred fifty pages are pure character development. It's entertaining and beautifully described character development, but every twenty pages or so it makes you say, "maybe the story starts on the next page..."... then it doesn't.... Shit, dude. Long time to sit around and wait. Then, ooh ooh, then the reigition of the plot comes upon what I would term a tenuous note at best. By damn, I'll take a tenuous note after reading for five hundred fifty pages.

Grrgle.... You may ask, why would I read through it that far? The fact of the matter, my fair compatriots, is M. Rothfuss has a way with words. He has a gift for description and a knack for characters. His every character is both familiar and original, maintaining a comfy level of, "oh, yeah, I know that guy," without lapsing into cliche. The characters are peopled upon a backdrop with a similar level of comfortable nearness just quirked to the left enough to feel original. Kvothe and his fellow spirits are not actors and their world is not the movie set that fantasy is often set upon. Kvothe is alive in a world, touchable and present, and you could almost walk through the book into the streets with him.

Almost. I extend this as high praise. And, therefore, I do recommend this book. I do not recommend it to everyone. I do not recommend this book to people who value plot and intrigue, nor to those frustrated by zig-zags in story and floating conflict and suspended promises. My recommendation for The Name of the Wind goes to those kids who love winding descriptions, love the opportunity to really get their fingers twisted in the dirt and really get to be on first name terms with the story's ghosts, and especially to those kids who need a long book to fill the time between things. The Name of the Wind's every page is a window into another world. It's a good, long, meandering trek into a poetic place. Them that like that, and are okay without much story, will love this book.

Enjoys.

From Script to Descripting: A Short Story Story

To all my fans, thank you one person. To all my other readers, I'm glad the fourteen of your are patient. To my eight specific critics, whose opinions I nought but respect, you guys are sometimes a bunch of adamant crazies.

One time during a UGWP meeting we were talking about screenplays. We talked about how we'd like to get our books turned into movies and whether we wanted to oversee the screenwriting. The general consensus was yeah, probably. The question then arose whether we'd want to do the whole screenplay ourselves. Now I happen to know that rarely does it occur that one person writes the have-all-end-all screenplay of a movie. Scripts of movies are organic, molded to scenes and days and what the last scene was doing and suchlike. The long and short of the discussion was that we, in general, didn't want to write our whole screenplay ourselves. Consult on it, sure, but we didn't want to be the primary screenwriter. We'd already written the damn story, we didn't want to write it again. I'm sure our opinion will be as organic as the screenwriting process demands, but whatever, we'll burn that bridge when we get there.

During this conversation I raised another point which had been mumbling around my mind for a while. I've been in an outlining education of late, and I've been getting excited about different outlining varieties and tools. One outlining tool I've been thinking about without quite applying it was writing a screenplay version of a story and then adapting the novel from that story. The way I see it, if patience held, then a screenplay would be a good outline. You'd get all the dialog and visuals out of your head, you could line up the story beats, figure out the acts, get to know the characters, without being bogged down with prettiness of prose and poetry in narration. It'd be like writing a whole book without any of the parts of a book that are hard to write. It's a great theory. I proposed it to the UGWP--the Underground Writing Project. Now, the thing about the UGWP is they're a bunch of studied, dedicated cats who have spent a lot of man hours figuring out how to write a good story. Together their accomplishments and expertise equal a doctorate or three and a sizable bookshelf of most excellent prose and poetry. Among them I am something like the novice, and I respect their opinions. Abandon all hope, they said. Why, they queried, would you want to write your novel twice? Why, they said, put yourself through the headache? I pondered for a time about how we expect to scrap our first draft anyway...then dismissed the thought as a passing whimsy of whimsy.

Lately, I have revisited ye olde preposterous concept, in ze form of necessary adventures in coworking. A script proposal I wrote has been accepted by Cellar Door Anthology--kudos for me. Naturally, I required a goodly artist to be drawering the comic book, for I am a most useless artist. As a point of immense fortuity, the lovely lass who has been so good as to grace me with her good will for a time is an excellent artist. My lady has a style close to mine as well. Having asked her to draw the comic book, and having finished a tolerably contentable script for it, we began to realize that my script writing skills leave a great deal to be required. Though my lass has an excellent imagination for visuals, she found my script hard to follow. I wrote it as a panel-by-panel recap of the story as I saw it, because the comic book scripts I've seen are written like that. She couldn't follow it, though. We began our conversation about the story with me saying I'd trust her to do good visuals of the story. But she couldn't visualize my script. However, she's had good luck envisioning other stories I've written, taken from the prose. In reply to her, I adapted the script for the comic book to a short story. I expected it to take me a while, but in two afternoons I did all of it but the last scene. The process of copying and pasting the dialog I wrote and filling in the description felt natural, intuitive. I even had a reasonably original voice for it, because I already knew from the beginning what I wanted the end to say. I found that I adapted the dialog a tiny bit, but not a great deal.

It went well, felt good. The result pleases me. I haven't shown it to anyone but my lass yet, but I hope my eye has been trained well enough that I can give an okay appraisal of my stuff. I'm not sure if the process could be easily repeated for a longer work. I have definitely decided that it has some kind of merit. I will not argue with the opinion of the UGWP that it probably ought to be hesitated before decided upon, but I have now conducted one successful experiment of the process. We shall see what future it has.

This song was nearly picked at random. I like it anyway:

Midnight Thought to Remember

I want to record this where I know I can find it again.

My creative process has five parts.

Part 1 (Spark): This is when the whole work, in a nebulous rush, arrives in my head. All of it comes at once, maybe more than I can handle, but it has no definition. Nothing can be done with it yet. It occurs the same for all my endeavours--stories, business, papers, whatever. It occurs often with some other thing as a catalyst. Like say I hear a snippet of odd conversation, that'll spark an idea. Music get my juices flowing, or reading things, or seeing how things work or wondering how things work. The spark happens in a flash.

Part 2 (discovery or framework): In this chunk I think through the logistics of a real-world execution of the sparked idea. This is where outlining takes place--outlining, research, technique. I like the word "discovery" for it because often this step is more of a rearranging of the world into a good shape rather than any intense product of my mind, or it feels like that. "Framework" is also a good word, though, because this step is like construcing a skeleton.

Part 3 (articulation or fleshing): In the great scheme of things, the least important part. This is where the bulk of time is spent, however, in the most visible bits. In writing, this is where most of the drafts appear. This, however, is the draft that will never see the light of day and only serves to give enough shape to my outline so I know what the story is supposed to eventually be. This part, ironically, is the part that writers are most famous for doing, and if we aren't doing it our loved ones assume that no work is happening. The truth of it is that the fleshing step squanders more time than any step except, perhaps, the lastest step.

Part 4 (revision or dressing): In this step the "fleshed" or "articulated" stage is given beauteous form. It is, after the second step, the least valued and, after the second step, the most important stage in this process.

Part 5 (showing): And this is where the product is seen. Without this step it is questionable, in my opinion, how real it is.

Whew. That is all. Just wanted to get that out there while I had it on my mind.

Thanks.

Unexpectedly, I Am Moved to Action

A psychological pseudo-protege of mine, Scrappy the Bear, just wrote a blog about competition. It bothered me for an unexpected reason, which I'll reveal in a second, after explaining how competitive I am.

Competitive I ain't. Competitive is a word I would put on a list of words that least describe me. I have no problem letting other cats have their athletic prowess, their brown-nosing teacher's pet position, their wilding fantastic lives of promiscuous sex, or whatever else they can do better than me. A lot of people can do a lot of things better than me. Do I care? Not really. If I were a species being judged by you Darwinists I'd have gone extinct eons ago through sheer politeness--although pure Darwinism might have trouble explaining how guile and good timing fits into things. I used to care how I measured up to other people, but then I realized it was more entertaining to watch them do things. I feel confident about my own talents and the cozy level of them I've attained through years of careful dramatic poses. I am uncompetitive because I like that other people can do things better than me. The world goes around because a lot of people can do a lot of things way better than I can do them. I do not want to be an athlete, nor an electrician, nor a politician, nor any of a great many things. I already know that the things I do well I do very well, better than most people and not as well as I know I can do them, and that's enough for me. I have no reason to compete.

It turns out that there is one arena in which the talent of other kids has a rankling, scratchy bletch on me. (Shite, "bletch" is considered a real word. Heh.) I am unfamiliar with this bilious rise of "damn their eyes--curse them for breathing, slack-jawed jackanapes." What ghastly turving a feeling it is. And yet not unhealthy, perhaps.... That one competitive arena I have is in writing. And by Christopher Moore's beard, Scrappy the ruddy Bear can write. She's got a lot a damn irritating habits in form and style, sometimes she loses her purpose because she's getting bogged down in being dramatic. These things happen. They can be revised away. But by damn, the girl can turn a phrase, and she writes with soul. It is singularly irritating to me that she genuinely sounds like a human being when she writes her personal essays. A somewhat whiny human being, but that's a good thing. We're all whiny, so we relate to whiny, so it makes her writing real. Sounding real, sounding genuinely there and talking, is so damn hard that I feel compelled to promote her bloggy-wog. I don't like that she done good, because she done better than I think I'm good at doing. But she done good. Y'all should read her bliggity-blig. And nag her when she doesn't update often enough. She almost never updates it.

Nag, nag, nag! Write more!

Come as you are. She needs weird friends.

Small-Time Fame, Fragmentation of Community, and the American Dream

In the 1950s, America went through an economic boom. That show Happy Days got it pretty close to right--ironically Happy Days was made twenty years after the Baby Boomer generation, in the seventies when everything about it was sarcastic and meant to justify discomania and to make America feel guilty about the Rolling Stones and doing drugs. In the fifties, a module of the ideal American family became created: two parents and one and a half kids. A stupid average, but that was the average. Suburbs started being built to support the average, McDonalds and the rest of the fast food industry went on a skyrocket trip, and America started to generate a particular image of "normal." You lived in a suburb with your mom and dad and your half a sibling, your dad went to work, your mom kept house, your half a sibling made do with one shoe, half a pair of pants, and a weird set of nicknames. You got a job by the time your were in high school and you started buying yourself cars and radios and records and clothes, and everything was happy days.

This model of "normal" endures in the American imagination, for some reason. A lot of people still live in suburbs, they go to Starbucks and shop at J.C. Penny's. They have a job when they're in high school and they start buying things for themselves as soon as they can. America is trying to be homogenized across the board. Whether you're in Chicago, Florida, freaking Denver, or Houston, you can still find those suburbs designed for one set of parents and their one and a half kids. These people expect that America is all suburbs. Suburbs hold a lot of America's population. One hot and steamy pile of happy to be normal.

All of this is made possible because of pop icons. Pop icons are only possible through mass media: TV and radio and internet make it so Californians and Dakotans and fucking Brits can have the same damn ideas about that Bieber kid and his ilk without ever trying very hard to discover what they actually like. Multi-national pop icons are not so because of talent but only because everyone knows them as such. They caught a marketing break. Good on to them.

Meanwhile there is a layer of fame below the international pop icon, probably six or seven steps down. This layer includes authors like Tim Powers and Diane Duane and David Brin and musicians like Coheed and Cambria and Cage the Elephant. At this level, the kids might have a fan base of several hundred thousand. These several hundred thousand are loyal as all hell, but scattered across the globe. So if you find that you're a huge fan of Coheed and Cambria, you might have a couple hundred Coheed and Cambria fans living within fifty miles of you but not many more. And you might not ever find many of them if you live in a reasonably large city. Additionally, this presents a marketing problem for Coheed and Cambria. Coheed and Cambria need to first market themselves to the masses in order to attract the few that really like them. That takes a lot of time, money, and energy. Hopefully the return on investment is worth it. In their case it seems to be.

This all makes me wonder about bipassing the attempt to draw a massive, multi-state/multi-national audience. I wonder why at least at first one might condense one's efforts. If, say, you live in Denver, as I do. The population of Denver is over six hundred thousand. That's just a bit less than the fan base of Coheed and Cambria--according to the facespace. I wonder how it would be if, rather than beginning by trying to appeal to the massive market of everyone, you tried appealing to the immediate market of your town and nearby towns. One of the things about marketing is that customers buy products from people they like. In my case, my product is my stories. If I'm going to sell my stories then they'll have to like me. I can't very easily nor quickly market myself to a massive audience. But I can more easily market myself to a local audience, an audience of six hundred thousand in Denver and more if I include the satellite states--which I will. Many of my favorite authors have quite small fan bases on the interwebs--less than ten thousand, by the study of a few moments. If I can get one in fifty people in Denver and the outlying areas to think I'm cool then I could be reckoned as successful as many of my role models.

I suppose that's a bit optimistic. Still, it makes me wonder. Conquering my hometown sounds much easier than attempting to conquer the world.

Which brings me back to my original thought: Homogenized America. See, the thing is about homogenizing anything is it makes everything the same. If everything is the same then how do you know what you like? It's all the same. So you don't know your neighbors because they're like you. Everyone wants to find what they like, but nobody can because there's just too damn much to sort through. So the pop icons become more famous because they've floated to the top so they can be found easily. Everyone knows of them, everyone likes them, so everyone feels as if they have this community because they can see that everyone likes what they like. The cycle continues as American homogenization continues.

The whole cycle makes originality very difficult. There may be a lot of people in the world who think that what you're creating is the cat's meow. Good luck finding them in the mass market. Unless--here's the clincher--you think about how big certain areas are, and, conversely, how they could still be manageable. If just the Denver and surrounding areas chunk is considered I could very possibly find a sizable amount of people interested in exactly the product I'm pushing, enough to make a scene.

This is exactly what the American Homogenization Comity--also known as the government--does not want you to figure out. What I could possibly be doing is setting out on the first steps of promoting local community. Le gasp!

'Tis a thought.

I'm not over!

Fish

In the name of efficiency, I'm shortening the damn word to "fish." So shut up.

"Fish" is when you get shit done fast without leaving shit out. (I'm listening to Keith Richards' autobiography read by Johnny Depp. Cope.) Ain't much needs be said about fish. Everyone's got their own idea about how to do it, but the damn word means doing shit fast without leaving shit out however the hell you do it. Weird part is when cats run around ignoring rules of fish for their own no doubt nefarious reasons. There's skeazeballs everywhere guilty of flagrant unfishincy--left-lane grannies, coffee shop nerve-wrecks, diner Sallies. In literature cats ignoring good fish spend their energies in fantasy, building worlds that ought to take care of themselves and explaining fascinating characters that capture the imagination and never do a damn thing till you've pissed off to watch some film or other. Fantasy bloat they call the act of spitting on good fish. Fucking annoying.

Whether I succeed or nay, my pledge to you my droogs, made with blood and piss and fuck all, is to make a hell of a charge at a smooth story. If it burns on reentry then it'll be a bright show.

"Kali Yuga III" by Therion and the Truth in Scope

 

Updated my novel. This song has been playing in my head today.

 

So today I'm thinking about the advantages of partaking of literature far from the type of literature you are trying to produce. If you are writing a fantasy for disenfranchised teens, for instance, you might spend some time watching film noir from the '50s.

 

That's my situation. I feel driven to watch movies and read books that have little stylistic similarity to the books I'm writing. I'm writing a distinctly gothic fantasy, basically in the same style as The Crow with Brandon Lee and Underworld with Kate Beckinsale. I've watched those movies and I'll reference back to them periodically when I'm thinking of how mood and imagery mingle. I spend most of my research time on totally distant things, though. Like I've been reading poetry recently--Keats--and taking some cues from that. And I've been watching obscure and less obscure movies--noir flicks from the '50s, H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man and its sequel, Nosferatu, Brom Stoker's Dracula by Scorsese or whoever. It's all providing valuable contribution to what's feeling like a more complete whole, as a result. It feels like doing the right thing.

 

It is interesting.

"Only" by Nine Inch Nails Helps Me Appreciate Music

I've decided to try to be more conscious of what intention musicians seem to have. I'll try to listen to poetry and pay attention to lyrics and to the visuals musicians choose to include with the music they're making. There's more intention and meaning than I used to think, and I used to have a lot of respect for rock stars. It's all very interesting.

Yeah.

"Lots of Drops of Brandy" by The Chieftains and Their Talent for Coaxing

Today's literary concept: Coaxing.

There are two ways of educating people: hammer tactics, and magic tricks. Hammer tactics are things like dramatic demonstrations and perfectly outlined theses and stuff where argument and thought are impossible. Magic tricks are far more insidious.

To educate with a magic trick, the student must believe they came up with the answer themselves. They must be caught and led to an answer and feel like they figured it out half a moment before the teacher gives them the last detail.

Of course, sometimes the tactics are the same.

"Lots of Drops of Brandy" wasn't supposed to be the song of the day. The song of the day doesn't exist on youtube, though, so the literary concept is not very well supported.

"Far" by Coheed and Cambria Demonstrates Words Juxtaposed against Pictures

A continuation of thinking about irony.

When the scene has little to do with the words being said it produces a different effect than that produced by scene and words agreeing. Words and pictures impact us differently. Where words cause us to think and attempt to think in reasoned lines, pictures can evoke instinct, emotion, and ambiguity or diversity in conclusions. Which becomes interesting when the pictures are described in our stories. We require words to show the pictures. In scene setting, our attempt is always to generate some sense of solidity with the slippery words that we have selected as our tool.

Hopefully, our description seems solid. We might all describe the same castle. The stones--the grit--the icicles--hopefully, we all succeed in conveying the coarse, cold touch, immense silence, the chalky smell of mortar; hopefully we give a distinct image of castle. We might opt to use language that is vague, soft, weak. Hopefully, the objective image "castle" becomes communicated anyway, though we might leave the audience thinking about jello, or something.

It's a thought. The ambiguity of language is our tool. If you want to make an institution look philosophically weak and physically impregnable, you might describe their Nazi architectural style with soft-sounding syllables and ambiguous words. A strong description ought to give the objective solidity of scene setting and, through word choice, it ought also to juxtapose an ambiguity.

"Burn" by Three Days Grace on a Snowy Day

Today's literary concept: Irony. I know of irony that literary critics are impressed by good executions of it; I know that irony contributes to storytelling. I'm still exploring how. In order to do that, I'll try defining irony then start thinking about how it's used in literature.

Definition from the Oxford English Dictionry of "irony": A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.

This definition would seem to imply that irony, as a literary tool, can be used to provide a critique of just about anything. Successful irony, it would seem, comes about when an author might spend a great deal of time seeming to praise something, like cannibalism, while demonstrating how horrible it is. Scathing social criticism comes about through successful irony.

Or, perhaps like my song of the day, irony can be used to complain about weather. It's snowing here. I have a song about fire on the mind. Ironic, perhaps. Perhaps not, though.

I shall revisit the concept of irony. Fear not.

 Heralds updated: http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-two-part-one.html

"Lukin" by Pearl Jam AND Yesterday on Heralds

"Lukin" is such an odd song. Yeah...

Yesterday on Heralds (http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapter-one-part-four.html):

Twig dscovered that his various stays that he relied on to guide his action compass, as it were, do not exist. His army, the Zombie Corps, is lost--the War has been over for years--his family wants nothing to do with him. All he has left is a granddaughter's wish that the cold world might be warmed, and he has a name to put to a faceless enemy: Ferryman. Ferryman is the god of death. Not that our hero finds that disouraging in the slightest.

This is a variation on the classic Call to Adventure portion in the Hero's Journey defined by Joseph Campbell. Campbell's observations of myth suggest that the hero ought to deny the call to adventure. I'm writing it so that Twig embraces adventure. He has been left in the cold, literally and figuratively, by the mightier-than-thou powers that be who would have called him to adventure. Left to his own devices, Twig decides his own adventure, Jason Bourne style.

Granola of the day: Cinnamon Raison.

What He Is Not

Novel updated: http://lithnmark.blogspot.com/2011/11/chapter-one-part-three.html

In this chunk, Twig speaks for a while with his daughter, Widow Lockwood, and his granddaughter, Trilby. He explains a few things that he is not, and begins to hint by exclusion at what he is. He is not a Holy Assassin--one of that order organized of old to be in thrall to Ferryman and help him in his grisly work of collecting men ready to die. We learn by hints that Twig surely killed Holy Assassins who had been hunting him. From them, Twig got his clothes.

I had trouble writing the scene clearly because I forgot to introduce Widow Lockwood by name till half of the way through. Whoops. Must remember not to do that in the future.